Playwriting Workshops That Transform

PlayWrite’s professional coaches and actors work one-on-one with youth at the edge.

Participants write and direct their own character-driven plays. By creating powerfully original art, writers learn profound emotional tools to trust themselves, manage their trauma, and heal.

Our ten-day intensive workshops run throughout the year.

Graduating Class of PlayWrite’s 2018 workshop with students at Mt Scott Learning Center, onstage at the Clinton St Theater.

“12 out of 19 years living in foster care has taken its toll. I developed abandonment issues, I had trouble relating to people, and I didn’t fit in at school. PlayWrite really opened my mind to learning... When I first saw my play performed, it was so intense… The experience has been a really good way to release all that is inside me, to write about it, and have it presented… it was a fantastic creative experience”

— Katrina, a 2007 participant in PlayWrite. Katrina studied at PCC Sylvania in Portland, supported by a Chaffee Educational Grant, Oregon Opportunity Grant, and Federal Work-Study funding. She is member of the Yurok Nation. Currently Katrina is Content Manager and Writer for a Los Angeles cosplay magazine.

“I look forward to making meaningful connections with young people. Empowering them to find their voice and learn new ways to express the things that are stirring within them. Reinforcing that they have value, that they are interesting. Listening with great care and making them feel seen. Treating them with respect and dignity as I help them along a path of self-discovery.”

“I was raised by a single mom, we had a lot of scarcity and insecurity, there was definitely trauma. But going through PlayWrite, this was one of the first times in my life that someone made me believe there was more to me.”

RESEARCH

The hippocampus, derived from the Greek word for seahorse, is a key anatomical structure in the brain. Amazingly complex, neuroscientists continue to discover more about how it functions: there is general agreement that the hippocampus plays a central role in the human capacity to turn personally experienced events and their associated emotions into memories. The PlayWrite workshop - combining written expression with movement - provides an opportunity for young people to unscramble complex emotional experiences into narrative form.